Cashiers and clerks at retail sales locations need a ready and convenient supply of change on hand at all times. "Change" as used herein is not limited to coins, but also includes bills of denominations sufficient to meet change-making requirements for the particular business. Failure to maintain adequate change at a cash register or the cash drawer of a point-of-sale terminal may at times delay completing retail transactions while the cashier obtains a new supply of change, a practice which may reduce the total volume of sales and irritate customers who must wait while the cashier or a supervisor delivers change from a locked safe or some other secure location.
The requirement for maintaining an adequate and convenient supply of change is particularly important in certain kinds of retail sales locations such as convenience stores and gas stations, where the amount of each transaction may be relatively low and cash frequently is tendered to pay the transaction. Moreover, some suppliers of merchandise for convenience stores traditionally require payment in cash on delivery of the merchandise, and those cash payments will further deplete the amount of money remaining in the cash register or point-of-sale terminal drawer for making change.
Safes intended for storing and dispensing change are known in the prior art. Such safes heretofore have been relatively complex in construction and may lack the flexibility of storing and dispensing change of varying amounts and capacities. Moreover, such change-holding safes of the prior art lack the accounting and audit capabilities desirable to identify amounts of change dispensed and to audit the amounts remaining in the safes. Such known change dispensing safes also lack provisions for temporarily storing and accounting for deliveries of change by an armored-car messenger or other service, so that the change is at hand but remains secured within the safe itself.